Other 1066 possibilities...

Dan Carlin

Okay...so how different do things go if Harold dies at Stamford Bridge (or the Saxons lose there? ) or if William is killed at Hastings (as was feared for a time during the battle)?

One thing is for sure...English would be easier to learn in school without all those French/Latin influences complicating it!

I wonder if the Norse had won at Stamford Bridge would THEY have fought the Normans in the South? Or would a North-South partition of England be more likely?
 

Jammy

I think it would depend on the victory;

1) if it was a close run thing and the viking army is almost destroyed then William will go straight up and kick Harold out and things continue like normal.

2) If its a total defeat for the Saxon then i see a north south divide happening - then a kind of cold war state between the two.

Would make an interesting TL
 

ljofa

If Harald III Hardrada won at Stamford Bridge, Tostig would either become King or Harald's viceroy but either way, he would owe his allegience to the Vikings. Tostig was a Godwin and despite killing his brother, he still might be able to command the loyalty of the family and the Saxons might flock to his banner. Harald and Tostig might therefore be able to destroy William's army and they'd more likely do so. I can't see Harald and Tostig force marching down south - more likely they'd take their time unlike Harold II who foolishly left half of his army behind.

Tostig was a capable governor and would have further developed the wool trade which at the time, made England one of the richest nations in England. With the weather getting colder and winters longer, the demand for wool would have surged thus increasing his treasury. Again, there would have been no harrying of the north; those one million or so people would have not died of starvation. The lack of economic predation would have meant that there would not have been an English north-south divide. The south of England would have furnished the Flanders markets, the north would have supplemented the Baltic and North Sea trade. Without the complications of French and Norman inheritances, England would not have been entangled in protracted wars on the continent - instead England might have looked west to Iceland, Greenland and beyond. Contact with the Americas might have occurred 200 years earlier and that would have led to a much more interesting development of human history with a more evenly matched pair of civilizations on the North American continent.
 

Fabilius

I agree with most of things posted here, although I must object to the notion, that English would be simpler without the Latin and the French influencing it.

English is simpler than Icelandic by far, it is simpler than German (in my opinion), and it is equally complicated as Danish, (again in my opinion).
 

Sgt Detritus

Dan Carlin said:
Okay...so how different do things go if Harold dies at Stamford Bridge (or the Saxons lose there? ) or if William is killed at Hastings (as was feared for a time during the battle)?

One thing is for sure...English would be easier to learn in school without all those French/Latin influences complicating it!

I wonder if the Norse had won at Stamford Bridge would THEY have fought the Normans in the South? Or would a North-South partition of England be more likely?
Click to expand...

Here are my thoughts on the matter:

http://www.angelfire.com/weird2/althistx/va.html/
 

Max Sinister

Banned
@Fabilius: One could argue that English contains very many French loanwords. Other languages are "purer" (not that this is inherently good).
 

Rick Robinson

Fabilius said:
I agree with most of things posted here, although I must object to the notion, that English would be simpler without the Latin and the French influencing it.

English is simpler than Icelandic by far, it is simpler than German (in my opinion), and it is equally complicated as Danish, (again in my opinion).
Click to expand...

Our chaotic spelling situation might be simpler, though - which is what people are often thinking of when they say that English is complex/hard to learn. Apart from a few odd-to-us specifics, such as the use of eth and thorn for soft and hard "th", and "gg" instead of "dg" (brigge = bridge), etc., Old English spelling was fairly straightforward and consistant - more or less, English written using the conventions of Vulgar Latin.

The prospective evolution of the English language itself usually gets slighted in alternate-1066 TLs. The grammatical changes, such as the decay of the inflection system and grammatical gender, were already ongoing before the Conquest (as shown by "mistakes" in later OE texts), and probably would have continued. The conservative influence of formal education might slow them down a bit, but more likely writing would merely lag behind the spoken language.

A victory by Hardrada, if consolidated across England, might reinforce Northern pronunciations, e.g., dike instead of ditch, skirt instead of shirt - rather than both forms surviving with variant meanings.

A Norman defeat would have a dramatic effect on vocabulary - farewell to all those French words. (Though if, as I suspect, later medieval England ends up in the French cultural orbit as much of Western Europe did, a fair number of French words may still come in later.)

The end result, by the TL's 20th century, might well be an English that we could understand and even speak fairly well - so long as we stuck to a 5-year-old's vocabulary. Sophisticated concepts ... well, I don't know the native English words for "sophisticated concepts," but it surely had them, because Anglo-Saxon England had been the intellectual center of Europe.

We might be able to half-understand a TV sitcom. The TV news would be "seventeen more gibberish were found dead today, as gibberish gibberish turned into open fighting ..." The newspapers would be totally incomprehensible.

-- Rick
 
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